


Colorfast

by stylishanachronism



Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: Gen, absconding with extended family lore for fun and profit, author has just enough Old English to get herself in trouble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-23 20:17:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18557086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stylishanachronism/pseuds/stylishanachronism
Summary: Blue is the color of the sea, the sky at false dawn, and the blood of whatever the cat just dragged in. It's all over the deck and it's terrible.





	Colorfast

**Author's Note:**

> Good morning everyone, it's my birthday today so y'all have to put up with my nonsense.

“Miss Asa!”

Miss Asa is looking very pleased with herself; she’s sitting in front of the... crab with her ratty tail wrapped around her paws, the part of her muzzle that’s fallen away giving her a jaunty sort of grin. The... well, it really looks more like a limpet than a crab, despite the legs, or maybe a barnacle, it has those teeth-like plates on the near end, whatever it is it’s the size of a small pony and leaking blue all over her deck, is twitching, rocking back and forth on its... upper shell? but not, thankfully, in a particularly lifelike manner.

Rekke pokes his head up from belowdecks and shrieks, recoiling so fast he vanishes again.

Merenædre pokes its head out of the carcass at the noise, dislodging the leg it’s been gnawing at, and that explains the twitching, at least, though not anything else. Miss Asa pounces, quick as a flash, dragging it out by the scruff and pinning it to the deck with a paw. The sight of her, grooming the navy streaked wurm within an inch of its life, very nearly sends Rekke below a second time; his color’s very high as he practically levitates away from the lot of it.

“What!” He points at the carcass, then Miss Asa, wild eyed and staring. “What!”

Miss Asa is looking somewhat the worse for wear; the salt’s been terrible for the integrity of her fur, poor thing, and it’s not like anyone’s had time to stitch her back together recently, but he was playing with her just yesterday, wasn’t he? so it can’t be that. Maybe it’s her kittens? She’s technically between litters but the wurmlings have a couple of centuries to go before they stop being babies, but this can’t possibly be the first time Rekke’s encountered them either.

“Miss Asa has brought us a present.”

She doesn’t really want to touch it, though it’s probably edible and they could use the supplies if it is, she can’t even imagine how the cat killed it even with the wurmlings’ help, but the alternative is leaving it to moulder on her deck, and the stain is already entirely unacceptable.

“I don’t suppose you know what it is?” He looks about ready to vibrate out of his skin, and she touches his elbow like he was Aloth or Estí without really thinking about it, startling herself when he flinches away. Of course, she keeps forgetting. He only likes to be touched on his own terms.

“I’m sorry.”

She turns away, embarrassed, crouching to get a better look at Miss Asa’s prize just in time for Ablignys to go sailing straight over her head instead of crashing into her, and it loops around, turning a lazy flip in the air before hanging itself from the rigging like some sort of bat to chortle at her. Merenædre squalls, wriggling ineffectually as Miss Asa focuses a particularly offending spot on the hinge of its jaw instead of letting it go play, though it can’t snap at her in this position, which is probably good for her continued structural integrity. It hasn’t bitten her yet, successfully, anyways, but those jaws are already more than capable of shredding her, no matter what it was that animancer did.

...Not that she actually remembers anything about those circumstances, and Edér had assumed she did and therefore hadn’t clarified, so she’s possibly more confused about Miss Asa in her entirety than when she started.

The blood staining her deck is as thick as warm honey, fairly tacky but not actually sticky on her fingers, like half cured varnish, and it smells like turpentine. Oh. Well. At least the stain won’t be permanent. If there’s a spare kettle onboard they might even turn a profit.

Miss Asa has finally decided Merenædre is clean enough for the moment; she lets it up and it springs after Ablignys, who drops from the rigging and flits away, the pair of them chasing each other around Rekke, who ducks with a yelp as one of them tangles in his hair and comes away with a few strands for its trouble. He is, at least, looking a little less like he might turn himself inside out, still wild eyed but less so, and he hunkers down beside her, reaching out to rub some of the blood between his fingers just the same as she had.

“What?” He offers her his stained fingertips, looking hunted and confused, and, well. He’s learning Aedyran alarmingly quickly, but that doesn’t mean he’s fluent, and she has no idea how to explain that Miss Asa and her kittens have hunted up an ridiculously enormous léaswelhecwen bug, she can’t even remember the Huana name for them, much less what the blood is used for.

Well. Vela’s well overdue a lesson in dye preparation in any case. Perhaps he can sit in.

She sets her tongue between her teeth, thinking about it, as he watches her with those bright eyes, the wurms tumbling across the deck behind him, fighting over what they’ve stolen of his bright hair, everything about this boy is hard to look at, his grief and rage and terror like a knife in the dark, and, well. It’s only to be expected.

She takes his sleeve very carefully with her clean hand, making sure he sees her coming, then proffers her own fingertips for comparison. She dearly wishes she knew what his shirt was dyed with, it’s a beautiful color, surprisingly fast, none of the wine dark to shadow deep shades vorlas takes, nor the perfect but unstable léaswelhecwen on their hands, and she could use the fortune it would win her; Caed Nua will take every coin she can throw at it and then some.

“We call it léaswelhecwen,” she tells him, “your shirt was dyed with something different, but the color’s similar.”

She lets him go, wiping her fingers on the deck, it takes a serious mordant to stay bright for any length of time, but that doesn’t mean she wants it all over her last remaining set of clothes, and stands, feeling abruptly very tired. Nothing for it, this should be processed or disposed of as fast as possible; perhaps, if there isn’t a spare kettle, Tekēhu will know how to turn it into food. She’s never heard of one getting anywhere near this size, but perhaps the ones big enough to eat are simply eaten. He’d certainly be the one who’d know.

Miss Asa finishes cleaning her own paws and chirps imperiously at the wurms, who stop scuffling and obediently follow her below instead, Rekke looking after them with something like laughter and something like bewilderment painted over his face, and it’s a good look for him, better than the trembling nerves he’s been wearing. She smiles, shaking her head when he gives her a quizzical look.

“Are you coming?” She offers him a hand up, almost startled again when he takes it, and turns them towards the hatch, letting him go when he pulls away.

She really does hope there’s a kettle.

**Author's Note:**

> Blink and you'll miss it Sunless Sea reference but: if the Engwithans could have figured out Lifebergs they absolutely would have, and I would have spent a lot more time crying in Deadfire. Also Lifebergs are now fantasy cochineal, but blue. Vorlas has always been fantasy indigo, but purple. (There is also definitely a red fantasy cochineal, but I know nothing about Maori as a language, which means I am in no state to actually name the thing. Also I keep going back and forth on purple being an extant word. I am never going to go back and edit to make that agree, probably, so if you see me flipping between colors for the same thing, that's what that is.) Incidentally you can actually dye things with crab blood, which is in fact blue, but it's ruinously expensive and used pretty much solely for medical purposes, so I've never worked with it.
> 
> I have a lot of thoughts about Eothas as a moderately effective magnet but suffice it to say: it's not necessarily canonical, but you do pick up animals from otherwise wiped clean places in-game, so I am making the assumption that this is true and factual and I just want my zombie cat back, Obsidian, this doesn't need to be hard.
> 
> Léaswelhecwen is a terrible kenning that means, roughly, 'false blue' because it isn't lightfast; the black wurm is named 'lamprey' and the white one 'surprise', and Asa is oddly enough a, uh, 'contemporary' name, so far as I can tell.
> 
> Speaking of, Miss Asa was a real cat, best mouser in the county and prone to spontaneously adopting and then raising kittens, many of which were not remotely feline, all of whom turned out to be excellent hunters themselves. I didn't name her.
> 
> Rekke canonically spends a lot of time talking about how people touch him, and I have a lot of feelings about that.
> 
> Lastly this was supposed to be a Pillars Prompts Weekly fill, but it didn't really end up working out. I'll leave it to you to guess which one.


End file.
